Introduction to Terathia

Welcome to my webpage (currently very WIP)! I am planning on using this website to hold information regarding my personal writing/worldbuilding project. The setting is a continent named Terathia on a fictional planet (currently named Exoria but keep in mind all of the names here are subject to change I am very bad at names lmao. I'll also make this webpage much more formal once I get more progress on it). The headers on left side will lead to links about various general subjects regarding Terathia (such as the map and geography/names of regions, how magic works in this world, the various species that can be found, etc.). Also as a note while this site is WIP any text in bold is essentially author's notes for myself (some author's notes may remain at certain points but I'll sort that out once I'm closer to finishing this stuff). I'm dumping a lot of stuff on this page but I will create other pages and split stuff off, just leaving a short summary here eventually.

Basic Premise of the World

The basic premise of Terathia is that it's a post-post-post-post (on and on) apocalypse/high fantasy setting. I have three major time periods that I'm planning on exploring in any works I make within this world (will primarily be either novels or graphic novels/webcomics if I can get the drawing ability/find someone willing to help). The earliest period is The Age of Gilded Blades, which is a mythological time period where heroes travelled about saving villages and slaying monsters while evil beings plotted and schemed.

Civilization at this point was heavily reliant on magic, creating great wonders such as cities that float among the clouds or towers which defy gravity and the laws of physics. It is planned to have ended around a thousand to two thousand years in the past from start of the "modern era" of the setting and to have spanned a period of time that was extremely long (thinking maybe beginning several thousand years before its end).

The Age of Gilded Blades ended when some goodhearted adventurers (who would be portrayed as bumbling at best and villainous at worst) were manipulated by an ancient evil to essentially bring about the apocalypse with ancient and mysterious technology, said apocalypse being known as The Light that Purged Life (might use this name for more formal/poetic purposes - i.e. people in universe are writing poems or historical accounts of thie event. In-universe commonfolk might just call it "The Collapse" or "The Apocalypse" or other simple names like that, for now I will just refer to it as "The Collapse" for shorthand).

The second major time period I may explore is The Age of Burnt Lands, which is the period of a thousand to two thousand years after The Age of Gilded Blades where the people attempt to survive the calamitous apocalypse that happened at the previous Age's end. Magic is basically nonfunctional at this point due to how The Collapse affected it (tl;dr it essentially destroyed all of the Environmental Mana in the world- see the Magic section for more details); and due to the fact that most civilizations before this period were heavily reliant on magic for nearly everything, the results were these civilizations essentially collapsing overnight.

Flying cities fell to the ground and great towers crumbled beneath their own weight and chaos reigned for the first century or so. Eventually things started to settle down and some semblence of order returned, though it was very sporadic and very much warlord-y. This continued, with various warlords taking power over the regions and fighting for control of the minimal amount of resources remaining (due to Mana being necessary for a healthy ecosystem - explained more in the Magic Section). Not much is known from this time period due to shitty recordkeeping, but eventually Mana began to return and the ecosystem began to recover much more strongly, and this period finally ended.

The final time period I will explore is The Age of Rebirth, which is when civilzation began to actually recover and rebuild itself. The peoples of Terathia have recovered for the most part, and while warlords still tool about and try to take over sometimes, it's much less frequent and less effective/widespread. While they use magic quite a bit, by this point the peoples of Terathia have learned how to not be so heavily reliant on magic for every little detail of their life, and have actively begun research to see if there is any way to aid regional ecosystems when something similar to this happens again (aka Environmental Mana being destroyed). This is the modern era of Terathia and is probably where I'll make my first few stories.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: while the stories I write for this world may have certain POVs from specific cultures in the world I am planning on attempting to make this world as wide and varied as possible, and as such once I have the baseline set in stone I will attempt to make this compendium as unbiased as possible. I may not be successful but I will do my best, and if anything at all seems Bad please let me know ASAP so I can fix/modify it! For now I will be focusing on the most prominent cultures of Terathia (where my initial stories are focused at the moment) so things will be very centralized around them for the moment, but after I get the basics of those cultures written down I will be expanding further, maybe making alternate webpages to explain things from the perspectives of different cultures or other things along those lines.